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January 25, 2005

A Group od Their Own

Adams, Katherine A. A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880-1940. Albany: SUNY P, 2001.

In the introduction to this piece, Adams explains that literary scholars assume a particular version of history concerning women’s entrance into professional writing at the beginning of the 20th century. She claims that their notions of history are not informed by historical texts, but rather from two influential works: 1) Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (which emphasizes women’s separation and isolation from public writing) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where women are seen as the object to men (xi-xiii). Adams revises the category of Non-Writer, where women were able to write but only within the confines of a patriarchal society. That is, they could not alter versions of the world, but rather were didactic for other women (xiv). She finds that these pieces do not accurately depict intellectual life from 1929- 1949. Thus, she creates a revisionary history to more sufficiently account for the vast numbers of women entering American colleges. She illusrates their experiences in schools (multiple writing classes as well as extracurricular activities like the creation of magazines, newspapers, and literary clubs) as well as their lives after school. Their experiences, according to Adams, worked to pave the way for future professional women through collaboration. In addition, they worked to redefine the general category of what it meant to be a writer (xvii).

• What are the methodologies/methods and how were they chosen?
Adams creates a revisionary history.
Methods—predominantly textual analysis of the following sources:
journals, letters, college papers, school magazine articles, yearbook entries, published novels, newspaper stories, and autobiographies (xvi). Poetry, historical texts (for example, current legislation), hisoricized magazines, lecture notes/syllabi, personal reflections, autobiographies, and statistical information.

Chapter Outline illustrates how Adams attempts to trace the trajectory of a woman’s experiences in college within her delineated time frame: 1) before 1880, 2) the college literature and writing class, 3)teachers and students 4) a writing career as subject, 5) continuing the groups, and 6) redefinition of women writers.

Problems: no indication as to why she chose to focus as heavily on particular historical figures or place emphasis on particular kinds of curriculum/clubs at the expense of others.
In addition, historical work that is placed along side of a kind of modern literary criticism/current historians. Seems as if there is somewhat of a disconnect insofar as one particular field could not possibly get the most out of this work.

A brief illustration of the range of sources used for Adam’s research:
• Direct historical archival work and analysis; draws evidence from other histories of women and/or writing/experiences both within and outside of the American University system; pedagogical scholarship (Annas, Caywood and Overing, and Freire for example); feminist scholarship (Cixous, Moi); various Census sources for statistical information; Composition scholarship (Ede and Lunsford, Bizzell, Berlin); literary scholarship and work/activists (Glaspell, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walker, Wilde).

Posted by kaconcan at January 25, 2005 06:38 PM

Comments

Posted by: senioritis at January 26, 2005 08:09 PM